A few Christmases ago, my brother gave me a copy of the animated version of the musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." I eagerly put it into the DVD player in our car to inflict it on my kids as we drove home from Christmas dinner at my parents' house.
I spent the better part of my adolescence performing in a traveling production of that show in Los Angeles. Granted, I played Schroeder, who is nobody's favorite. I consider him the Aquaman of the Peanuts Superfriends.
That said, Charles Schulz's classic characters were a big part of my life during my formative years, and I couldn't wait to share this show with my children.
I wasn't prepared for the reactions I got. "What is this? Is this supposed to be funny? Does anything happen? Why is Charlie Brown such a loser?" Good grief.
That experience made me reflect on the "Peanuts" phenomenon. In retrospect, it's hard to understand why these characters penetrated the pop culture psyche as deeply as they did. The jokes aren't laugh-out-loud funny, and the art isn't particularly remarkable. And Charlie Brown is an extraordinarily unlikely protagonist. He is, indeed, a loser, and his life is largely a sad one.
Why, then, has his story endured, even to the point that his strip remains in print 14 years after its author passed away?
The simplest answer is that everyone identifies with Charlie Brown. Certainly I did. I thought about him in school every time we lined up to pick teams at recess. Not only was I the last one picked, I remember several occasions where team captains fought over which one had to take me.
As we get older, we romanticize our childhoods, but, at the time, they were often times of frustration and rejection. Charlie Brown served as the universal embodiment of childhood misery, and the fact that he could endure it well gave the rest of us hope. Yet that universality of the character hasn't passed on to the next generation the way, say "Calvin and Hobbes" has. My kids have dog-eared several editions of the "Calvin and Hobbes" paperbacks, but they leave all of my "Peanuts" collections untouched.
I bring all this to your attention because I recently watched the movie trailer for the "Peanuts" feature film slated for a release next year.
I had heard about this movie, and I was apprehensive. Schulz left explicit instructions in his will forbidding anyone from continuing the strip without him. Yet here, on the horizon, was a 3-D movie using his beloved characters, which seemed like a ripe opportunity for exploitation. Having been disappointed in the recent cinematic adaptations of the Dr. Seuss books, this looked like another disaster in the making.
Then I saw the trailer and fell in love with it. There's not much to it, really. It's just Charlie Brown standing there while Snoopy dances around him, and it ends with a hug. But the look of the animation is remarkable. Even though it's computer animated with the kind of 3-D look we've come to expect from in a Pixar world, it still looks as if it's hand drawn somehow. I have no idea how they did that, but it makes this feel more authentically "Peanuts" than it probably should.
And that's what sold me. This wasn't just an homage to "Peanuts" - it was the real thing.
It remains to be seen if this movie will bring Charlie Brown and his friends into the 21st century, or if it will just be an exercise in nostalgia. Perhaps my kids kids will still be unimpressed. But the fact is that Charlie Brown is coming back.
I didn't realize, until I saw this trailer, how much I'd missed him.%3Cimg%20src%3D%22http%3A//beacon.deseretconnect.com/beacon.gif%3Fcid%3D154974%26pid%3D46%22%20/%3E